Ad Testing Improve Advertising Effectiveness

What is Ad Testing?

Ad Testing, also known as advertising research, is designed to improve advertising effectiveness. Companies often test their advertising with a subset of a target market before rolling out a campaign to a broader target market. The goal is to save money by optimizing both the message and calls to action before spending advertising dollars.

Ad testing allows you to:

Determine which market segments to target

Give input to ad creators to better understand the audience

Make an informed go or no-go decision

Evaluate the performance of an ad agency

Get the highest ROI out of your ad spend

Why is Ad Testing Important?

Imagine that you’re in charge of your company’s Super Bowl advertisement. Your past Super Bowl ads have been successful, and have even made their way into pop culture, but you feel it’s time for a change. Your boss has given you the green light to mix things up with the understanding that if the ad doesn’t at least match previous year’s performance, your job is on the line. What do you do? Test your ad.

Even if you’re not working with a multi-million dollar advertising budget, it is wise to test your ads. Ad testing is one of the best ways to see how effective a new ad might be without blindly blowing your budget. You can use the test feedback to refine the advertisement or kill it altogether. The test provides insights to help you make informed decisions about how to best use your advertising budget.

How to Conduct an Effective Ad Test

Ad tests work best when you have a clear expectation of the purpose of the ad. Some advertisements are designed to promote awareness, while others look to build a brand or drive behavior. Regardless of the intent, it’s important to define the goal of the advertisement before running tests.

Three commonly performed ad tests include:

Recall: Companies need to be memorable if customers are going to consider their products or services. In a recall test, participants see an ad and then wait a specified amount of time before being asked whether they are able to recall a particular ad or product.

Persuasion: A test for persuasion determines the effectiveness of an ad in changing attitudes and intentions. This test assesses brand attitudes before and after ad exposure. Participants first answer a series of questions before seeing the proposed advertisement. Then they take a second test to assess how the advertisement changed their attitudes and intentions.

Response: Many ads are designed to drive an action or a conversion. This is especially true of online businesses that rely on click-through and conversion to drive revenue. In a response test, participants receive an ad with a unique identifier (URL string, promo code, phone number, etc.) to track how well the advertisement performs in converting interest to action.

How Qualtrics Makes Ad Testing Easy

Testing ads increases effectiveness, improves ROI and helps you make the most of your advertising dollars. Qualtrics gives you a survey platform to test ads with unique question types not found in other survey tools – from heat maps and hot spots, to questions that support embedded content so you can test images and video.

Qualtrics is the world’s leading enterprise survey technology provider. Customers love the ability to easily create a survey and get feedback in real-time. Start a Free Account or Request a Demo to see how Qualtrics can help you test your advertising.